Those kind of printers are still used somewhere so one actually needs to pass CR if one want to print, for instance, shipping documents right.

Agile in contrast is a mess. Define your test cases up front, but don't have your actual goals defined.

Well, I think TDD works if you are making something which can be systematically tested. Like some algorithm which you give X as input and you expect Y as output (and you know what Y is supposed to be). When combined with CI you get regression tests. But I've yet to see this in action with anything complex. I've personally used TDD with a very limited part of a project. It worked fine but I'm not sure if the extra hours I put can be justified in such a small case.

I really can't understand how one can run a project where you don't know what the goals are. How an earth can one know a) when the project's finished b) how to test it, if you don't have at least decent requirement specifications! If your customer changes requirements all the time you need make them understand that it's going to cost a lot and it's going to push the deadline back or you have to drop functionalities out. If things get really messy you just have to tell your customer "we are going to do this version production ready new and put all the changes to the next version". Otherwise you ruin your business and customer's business.

And yes, the guy I worked with in the past was/is also a programmer so he had to eat his own dogfoot :)

I think you are right about design patterns and software development models but, well, let's take an example. Let that example be me, which is my favorite subject :)

I've been writing software over 10 years for living and plenty more as hobby. I've been using development models which I don't recall all anymore and design patterns that even didn't know had a name. These days I'm in a lucky position that I don't have anyone above me (in corporate hierarchy) who comes and tells me how to do my job. I can use what ever pattern or model seems to fit and usually it works adequately fine, though sometimes I'm in a hurry and I don't have time to think so I have to rewrite some parts later. Now I wrote adequately because that's what our company needs, software that works and it must works now! We don't have to time to wait that I write my stuff following all the fancy rules of modern software developing. So my code isn't "brilliant" but usually it works.

But if we go back ten years and put me in same kind of position where there's nobody to tell me how to do my stuff. I would be absolutely lost! I would most likely open up Wikipedia, use every goddamn pattern there is and the outcome would be a big mess which is very past deadline. I'm lucky that I had a good software architect to guide me ten years ago. One that knew what to use and when (mostly German beer and all the time but every now and then we did some coding too).

Now so that my comment wouldn't be moderated too high I slip something about my feelings towards software development models here: Waterfall rules! Agile sucks! You just need to plan your projects beforehand! ;)

Or you could totally skip Linux and go to FreeBSD. At least documents and support is better than "When in Rome".

In Finland church tax is 1% from incomes. Church also gets some percent from every company in Finland through taxes to maintain cemetaries and keep funerals. So it's possible to avoid church tax if you are in the proletariat class but not if you own a company.

Eroakirkosta is great service! I used it some years ago and so did my wife. I've heard that before this you had to go to church office in person to fill out resignation form. I've even heard that some had to state reasons for their resignation form was accepted like if church had the power to keep you in binding contract against your will.

Exceptions? You may enjoy checking the return value of every function and writing classes with .is_valid() methods. I don't. You did make sure you checked *every* return value, right?

I'm sorry if this isn't what you meant but I just had to point out that, at least IMHO, exceptions shouldn't be used as return values. Return value is a, well, return value but exception is for something exceptional. For instance AllocateMemory(int len) method would return void pointer pointing to the newly allocated block or throw OutOfMemory exception if system is out of memory.

There's three things missing: calendar, contacts and I don't think MS Dynamics CRM integrates with it very well.

Thanks for the info! That confirms my hypothesis that thermostat is totally useless thing when doing my purely academical studies. It just slows down the process.

alcohol evaporates faster than water so it is the first liquid to evaporate

Everyone who is or has been a student in some part of their life should know that alcohol vaporizes in 83 Celsius. And in fact my empirical studies, purely academic of course, have shown that the temperature of the liquid does not rise significantly over 83 C until all the alcohol has been evaporated. (Collect it to a flask and filter it through activated carbon. Just remember to toss the first decilitre away or you might get blind.)

Well, yes, but then you could say that we already have Ford so why would anyone want to manufacture any other cars :)

But for example Singularity seems interesting OS. There's a lot of cool ideas, even allthough I'm not sure if they are original MS Research ideas. Plan9 seems rather interesting too. Now I don't know if any of these exotic OSes are used in production or is it even reasonable to do but who knows, maybe some useful ideas flows from them to current or future OSes.

I think diversity is a good thing especially in research.

Especially in an oven, where is the alcohol gonna go?

Through cooling process into a bottle (why waste good stuff?). There is proceeds through my mouth into my stomach. After a couple of hours it ventures on to the sewer system if I only remembered to unzip my pants. Usually it just soaks in to my jeans.

Maybe that would be a sane decision to make but I personally would like to see a totally new OS which is not Yet-Another-Unix-Variant or another Linux distro. I don't mean that there's anything wrong in Unix or Linux or in any other current OS. It's just that, well, new is new, and if they can come up with brand new ideas to do things (and share it with rest of the world on at least some level) then all the better.

The meaning of life is to start and to end. And pay taxes between.

In Finland they would shoot you if you are unlucky or arrest you, take your shotgun away and charge you with violent resist, murder one attempt plus some minor things if you are lucky. It's not allowed here to defend your property. Sometimes I hate this socialist country.

Agreements between parties does not override written law.